Stephen R. Donaldson, The Mirror of Her Dreams (1986) -- Pulled into another dimension by the good-hearted oaf, a young woman tries to navigate court politics in a kingdom on the verge of dissolution.

Oh man, this book was my jam when I was thirteen or fourteen years old, and in retrospect, it's because I hadn't yet discovered romance novels (or Internet porn), so this represented the outer limits of literary Kink for me. The Mirror of Her Dreams was, to me, what Forever Amber or Clan of the Cave Bear or Flowers in the Attic were to other thirteen-year-old readers. Bonus: The Mirror of Her Dreams does not have any "actual" (i.e. penetrative) sex, so it managed to titillate and excite thirteen-year-old me without tipping me over into prudish outrage.

So, when I read this book now and note all the BDSM elements and eighties-romance-genre tropes, I'm willing to concede that my own youthful relationship with the novel may be coloring my interpretation. But, also, I'm inclined to think that Author Donaldson is engaging pretty deeply with his personal id. I've never read Lord Foul's Bane all the way through (I think I got to the Signature Rape Scene and then bailed) or his Gap books, but The Mirror of Her Dreams feels...well, on one hand, as if Donaldson is trying to do something somewhat light and commercial (in a mid-eighties publishing universe) but also as if he's way into the kind of genre books that get read by women (in a mid-eighties publishing universe). The Mirror of Her Dreams seems steeped in lady fiction -- big-haired bodice-rippers in particular. The protagonist Terisa is the POV character for most of the book; she's surrounded by women (princesses and serving maids) who have their own ambitions and motivations and who frequently function as Terisa's antagonists in various political maneuvers.

The Mirror of Her Dreams passes the Bechdel test. I just can't imagine that anyone would consider it (at least in today's climate) as a particularly feminist work.

The aspect of the novel that has aged the most poorly is the passivity of our heroine, who starts the novel as unloved and traumatized and then spends the entire novel self-consciously thinking about how passive she is: "As she studied his intent expression, Terisa caught a glimpse of what made him so accident-prone. He was too many things at once--a boy, a man, and everything in between -- and the differing parts of himself seldom came into balance. She found him attractive in that way. Yet the perception saddened her; she herself wasn't too many things, but too few" [52] and "If she wanted to live, she would have to do something to save herself -- shout for help, jump to her feet and flee into the secret passages of Orison, something. Yet she remained lost, unable to understand why anyone would attack her with such hate, unable to move" [97] and "The idea made her shiver. What did he mean? Something intimate and presumptuous -- but what? Her mind remained stubbornly blank on the question. How would he touch her? What emotions would he draw out of her? She was too ignorant: ignorant of men, of course, but also of herself" [169-170]

As that last quotation suggests, Terisa's passivity has a particularly sexual element: dudes want to bone her, and she blinks back at them in puzzlement, and that just inflames them further. This is the part of the novel that seems the most...indicative of the kind of ritualistic domination (and rape) that was part and parcel of romance novels in the eighties. (I.e. the Duke of Whatever vigorously rapes his governess, who obviously resists (because virtue and purity gotta go hand in hand), but after he takes consent off the table, she realizes that she likes sex and everyone lives happily ever after, rinse lather and repeat.) Reading The Mirror of Her Dreams, I kept wondering if Author Donaldson was mocking some of these tropes, because Terisa's relationship with the sexily villainous Master Eremis is asymmetrical to the point of absurdity: "He was tall, strongly built in spite of his leanness. His nose was too big; his cheekbones were too narrow, too flatly sloped toward his ears; his black hair formed an unruly thatch on the back of his skull, leaving his forehead bald. But the humor and intelligence in his pale eyes made him keenly attractive. He was wrapped in a jet cloak, which he wore with an air of insouciance. The ends of his chasuble hung as if he might start twirling them at any moment [29-30] and "When he was that close to him, his physical impact on her dominated everything else. He gave off a slight scent of perspiration and cloves, and she could feel muscle working over bone under his jet cloak." [190-191]

(Let us pause for a moment to savor that fucking image. The muscle over his bone under his cloak? How many layers of matter can Terisa feel? Does she just have a hand clamped down hard on the fabric as she purrs, "Yesssss, the muscle, the booooone, yes"? Dear Reader, I know we're supposed to be breathless at the idea of Eremis's corporeal dominance -- so many muscles, such bones! -- but I don't know how you can read a sentence like that without laughing.)

(Also a winner of a sentence: "Framed by her pale skin and the short crop of her bale blond hair, her violet eyes flashed vividly." [145])

Eremis spends a lot of time trying to have sex with Terisa. Most of these attempts involve a) licking her mouth and b) hardening her nipples:

"His tongue stroked her lips, giving her a taste of kisses she had never experienced." [195]

"His hand slipped inside her shirt. His fingers were cold, bringing her nipples erect at once, making her breasts ache for him." [379]

"A strong mouth covered hers. A tongue stroked her lips, probing delicately between them. She tasted cloves. Under the blankets, a hand caressed her belly, then moved up to her breasts. Its touch was just cool enough to make her nipples harden." [579]

Meanwhile, Terisa's maid Saddith has super-bountiful breasts:

"To hide a smirk, she glanced down at her unbuttoned blouse, the cloth stretched open by the pressure of her breasts." [164]

"...Saddith sailed grandly into the room like a yacht on show, the lower buttons of her blouse straining to contain her breasts." [339]

"Saddith glanced down at her tight bosom." [437]

"As usual, Terisa's eyes were drawn to Saddith's open blouse and bursting breasts. She made an effort to raise her head so that she felt less like she was talking to Saddith's chest." [547]

Admittedly, Saddith is also boning Eremis, so Terisa feels a lot of sexual envy and curiosity toward her, which explains some of the breast-heavy focus of the Saddith scenes -- but I also suspect that, you know, the gratuitous degree of breast-descriptions in this novel don't always have a lot of strictly literary motivations.

Rounding out this collection of id-tacular elements: the captain of the castle guard is simultaneously suspicious of and aroused by Terisa, and there's a fun interlude where he punches her and threatens her. (In the sequel, this escalates to rape threats, oh boy!)

So it's pretty obvious why Pubescent Me, who had not read a lot of literary depictions of fucking, would have eaten this novel up with a spoon. Two decades later, after having read a lot more literary depictions of fucking -- some written by actual women!!! -- I find The Mirror of Her Dreams to be rather weak gruel in that regard.

And yet. There's one male character who isn't forever creeping on Terisa, and that's Geraden, the puppy-ish young man who drags Terisa into Weird Narnia, where absolutely everyone despises him. Geraden is brave and virtuous and good-hearted; Geraden adores Terisa and puts absolutely no demands on her. And he's not an insufferable paragon either; his fuck-ups are what motivate most of the plot of the novel, which prevents him from tumbling down a Will-Ladislaw-from-Middlemarch hellhole. He's meant to be the third leg of the Terisa-Eremis-Geraden love triangle, and so while Eremis spends all his time twirling his chausable/mustache, his foil spends that time being nice to Terisa.

And this is the part that makes me wonder if Donaldson is maybe trying to do something subversive with Romance Novel Tropes -- because in that genre, Eremis -- powerful and virile and maybe keeping a mad wife in his attic -- would be the Romantic lead, while Geraden would be the red-herring runner-up, the Beta Male, the Duckie from Pretty in Pink. But in The Mirror of Her Dreams, Eremis is just sort of slimy and gross, and Geraden is charming and sweet. Thirteen-year-old me found him charming and sweet; Jaded Current Me still finds him charming and sweet -- even in a novel with zero subtlety and little nuance. I am hard-pressed to think of another literary character that I would rather invite to my birthday party. Geraden is just swell -- which is a weird thing to encounter in a novel with all these clunky, kinky elements.

I saw The Wedding Plan yesterday with Zane and Betty and J. It was cute. I liked it. (Zane tells me that the fish-smearing scene is not normal practice.)

I also saw Wonder Woman with Bear et al. It was...okay? Decidedly less amazing than the euphoric reviews made it seem, though. I think movie reviewers are just really, really bummed out by the Batman/Superman movies, and they're so desperately relieved to see a fun, Disney-esque film that their critical apparatuses are not functioning at peak power. However, I am reminded -- once again -- how much I enjoy movies in which buff ladies beat up men.

It's the middle of the night and my body has decided WAKE UP MAN so now I am noodling around the Internet and found this article. It's a hell of a article, with a hell of a penultimate sentence:

I don’t know what a deliberately boring book about anorexia would look like. The closest Osgood gets is when she writes, “I used to sit in trigonometry class and calculate my intake obsessively in the margins of my notebook, each time coming up with the same answer, each time dismissing my mathematics as unreliable.” That is a much more accurate description of the disease than anything involving clavicles or frozen yogurt or sexual abuse or the fear of feeding tubes. If we really wanted to protect our supposedly susceptible youth, we’d paint anorexics as they are: slowly suicidal obsessives who avoid other people and expend ninety-five per cent of their mental energy counting the calories in green vegetables. We wouldn’t see them as worth reading about at all.

And Bear, laughing until he sobbed at this Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, pressed his hands against his chest and cried, "Oh! Oh, my heart!"

II.

A week ago, we all went to the bar, and I ended up sitting next to him, and since we were all cheek-to-jowl in that booth, he had his elbows up on the table to avoid digging into me.

He's slender and delicate, and his hands are long and slim -- and absolutely covered in hair, dark and thick and deep and spiraling up the back of his wrist past his knuckle, and his hands were clasped loosely before him in the manner of a very elegant monkey.

III.

Yesterday, as I frantically tried to finish this god damn paper and get it sent out, he went off to a campus screening of Persepolis. When he came back, he brought me a slice of the pizza that had been given out after the movie.

"It has, um, pineapple?"

"Oh," I said, tearing into it, because I hadn't eaten all day. "It's the most delicious thing I've ever had."

He cocked his head to the side and looked at me uneasily. "Is that...sarcasm?"

"No, I mean it," I said, and I felt a pang that he already knows me well enough to reflexively doubt everything I say. "Did you like the movie?"

"Oh, yes," he said. "It was beautiful. I cried at the end." He shrugged. "I am a crier, you know? I cry at everything. Movies, the evening news, pfffh, everything."

I went to see Richard III with Betty and Veronica last night. At the beginning of the intermission, Veronica went to the restroom and Betty went to enter her name in the raffle drawing for a bottle of wine.

Veronica went still. "What? But...I just entered my own name in the raffle drawing."

Betty shrugged. "Oh, okay, sorry."

"That means that my name was entered twice..."

"Yeah..."

Veronica stared at her. He was as angry as I've ever seen him. "Why did you do that? Why did you enter my name? Now that means... It won't be fair..."

"Shhh," she said. "Okay. It doesn't matter."

"Yes, it does--" he started to say, and then the stage manager took the stage to make the raffle drawing.

"And the bottle of wine goes to...Veronica?"

Betty and I grinned feverishly as Veronica stiffened and straightened and -- finally, with every muscle in his jaw clenched -- stood up to accept the bottle of wine. It was clearly one of the worst moments of his life.

(I told this story at the bar tonight to Bear, and Veronica stared flatly ahead and said that, in order to make their redress to the universe, he and Betty would be skipping the raffle for their next play. "Maybe even our next two plays," he added.)

II.

At the bar tonight, Veronica and I argued about the definition of a "procedural," and an hour later, when we were leaving (and after I ran back into the bar to find my scarf), I found him waiting for me on the sidewalk with an air of deep melancholy.

"I was totally wrong about that procedural thing," he said immediately. "And then, when you corrected me, I just brought up a totally different genre and pretended like that false evidence supported my argument."

"Um," I said, because I was a little bit drunk and had already forgotten about this discussion. "...okay?"

"I was very wrong," he repeated, and it was clear that this rhetorical sin had been eating away at his puritan soul for an hour.

"Nah, it's cool," I said, a little sleepily, and then I told him about some dumb argument that Lockwood and I had, in order to reassure him that I have doubled down on errorneous arguments in the past as well, and he suddenly smiled in wide, helpless relief.

III.

I stumbled back to the workroom and, through the miracle of social networks, started watching the live feed of the university symphony performance featuring Ariel. I scanned the musicians looking for him, and when I finally found him, I felt the same base glee as a child successfully locating the striped scarf in Where's Waldo. He had one elbow resting along the rounded top of the bass drum, and the fingers of his hand wiggled in nervous energy as he waited for his cue, and I felt such a burst of warm, happy recognition at seeing someone I knew do something so characteristic of themselves.

"Hey, sweetheart. Have you considered calling the vet? This was the suggestion from Proust...who is shaking her head, because she doesn't want to be a part of this."

II.

I told Veronica the story of Gosling and Lockwood.

ME: "I told Vidalia about it. And then I had to forbid him from e-mailing Gosling to ask him about his new best friend."

VERONICA:[laughing] "Vidalia! That's not how gossip works! You don't go straight to the source like that. Or maybe it speaks well of Vidalia. Maybe he just doesn't understand how gossip works."

ME: "Because he's never experienced it before? Oh, man, I don't think that was it, but it's an amazing theory."

VERONICA: "In high school, me and my friends never gossiped. We just said terrible things to one another's faces. I called it 'front-stabbing.'"

III.

At work, Gosling had fled without notice, leaving behind a project that he had been given only because it was the only thing he could be trusted not to fuck up.

As such, I was somewhat suspicious when my boss, cajoling me into taking on the project, explained that I was "patient" and "detail-oriented" and so perfectly suited for said project.

"Ah, yes," I said slowly, "People often say that I'm...detail-oriented..."

Later, after I expressed some confusion to the sub-boss, she laughed and said, "Well, yesterday when she said that she was going to assign you to that thing, she said it was because you were 'persnickety.'"

"I'm persnickety?" I said. "What about Veronica?!"

"Hey, hey, I'm sensing some hostility here," Veronica said.

"It's just, out of the two of us, when one person finds an error in the catalogue, one of us just shrugs and keeps on trucking, and the other is all, 'Oh, no, we have to fix this entry, everything has to be perfect.'"

IV.

At lunch, my boss asked us about a mysterious restaurant "coming soon" that has been advertised on the side of a new building for the past six months, and Veronica waited the perfect amount of time before he said, "We'll just have to keep hoping that it'll be a Cracker Barrel."

V.

Many hours later, Vidalia asked me how my stuff was going, and I told him at manic length, and he nodded sagely and said, "Well, I'm glad to see the flood gates have opened."

Behind his thick glasses, Harper has a perfect slow burn, playing the bespectacled Cary Grant to Bell’s bratty Katharine Hepburn. He makes her better; she makes him freer. Even after we learn that they’re both marked for the Bad Place, it’s impossible to believe they deserve it.

Mulling over productivity today, I think it's probably ideal to aim for 15 pomodoros a day. That gives me five solid hours of concentrated work a day, and from long experience with my brain, that's pretty much what I'm capable of sustaining over the long term.

Yesterday I did 2 pomodoros -- going into work really disrupted my ability to do anything.

Current Tally: $31

I re-watched the first two episodes of Riverdale today. For...research.

(Does Polly exist?! Well, imdb lists an actress for the role, so probs.)

Also, the Internet just informed me that Chris Evans and Jenny Slate have just broken up. This bums me out nearly as much as the temporary Danny DeVito-Rhea Perlman split. (And let us speak not of Will Arnett!!)

Yesterday I did 9 pomodoros (in which I wrote morning pages, wrote ~300 words, synthesized my sacrament notes, and starting speeding through HC's letters).

Then I got suckered into a friendship obligation and spent $10 on a beer and mozzarella sticks.

Current Tally: $29

This morning I went into work to assist my sub-boss in stuffing envelopes, and then I came home and slumped around and did nothing productive. Blergh! I was supposed to go to a friendship obligation this evening, but I'm bailing in the hopes of actually getting some writing and/or laundry done instead. (Blergh!)

I also went through ao3's tag for Riverdale; there is a lot of not-very-good stuff on there. (And a couple of brilliant femslash stories.)

A story about Gosling: Lockwood reports that she tried to hang out with Gosling, but he's being too cool for school and the one time they got a drink, it mostly involved Gosling playing with his phone and ignoring her. Understandably, he's now dead to Lockwood. BUT the ironic twist is that Lockwood ran into him at a protest last weekend. Lockwood was with a friend and a friend-of-a-friend, who is a famous figure in our industry. As soon as Gosling recognized him, suddenly it was "LOCKWOOD, MY DEAREST FRIEND!"

Understandably, he is now double-dead to Lockwood.

A story about Veronica: J. vaguely referenced a recent injury, and I betrayed some knowledge of that injury. "How did you know about that?" she squealed. I tried to indicate C., but J. was already saying, "Oh, I know. It must have been Veronica. Because I told him about it, and then I asked if he was going to tell anyone, and he said he wouldn't tell anyone, but he would tell you, because he tells you everything." ("Okay," I managed to finally get in, "but, once again, he didn't tell me...")

He came in a little later and had a morose conversation with me. "I have to go," he said at last. "I'm too hyper." He was, as far as I could tell, being completely serious.

Yesterday I did 14 pomodoros: I did laundry, I did morning pages, I read half a dozen books, and I wrote ~600 words.

Current Tally: $30

Yesterday, I saw Ariel in the office, and he said that he had ditched the birthday party as well. And also everyone he knew had also ditched.

We made identical faces of horror at one another. "Did...anyone go?"

Yesterday, I muzzily made my way through the first two episodes of Riverdale. I enjoy depictions of creepy suburbia -- Twin Peaks, Life is Strange, Brick -- so I am along for that ride, but I'd prefer it if Betty/Archie/Veronica weren't a foregone conclusion. It would be a lot more fun if I could pretend that they were just going to stay tight but date beyond their friend-group. (And obviously that's not going to happen.) I am also amused at the Lolita glasses that wardrobe gave Ms. Grundy; I'm assuming that she'll tie back into the murder plot through some kinky affair that she was conducting with Jason Blossom. (I'm assuming, as well, that making the Blossom twins red-heads will yield some sort of dramatic pay-off in regards to red-headed Archie.)

This morning I'm going to stay home and keep banging out this chapter. This afternoon I'll go into the office and sit through a pointless-but-karmically-mandated event.

On Friday, I did 1 pomodoro (in which I cleaned) -- but, in my defense, I did go into work for seven hours.

On Saturday, I did 9 pomodoros (in which I wrote my morning pages, reached inbox zero, did tax stuff, cleaned house, read more about sacraments, and collected all the fiddly bits for the reimbursement I need to submit Monday).

Current Tally: $16

I also bailed on going to a birthday party, for which I suspect the birthday boy will never forgive me -- but as I sat in my darkened bedroom, eating a cheddar-cheese-and-creamy-caesar-dressing sandwich, I thought, "Well, I could put on my coat and walk for half an hour to go to an unfun house party with a bunch of drunken bros and a deadly fire pit on the bottom of a steep incline...or I could go to bed."

Dear Reader, I went to bed.

Betty invited me over to a Superbowl party tonight, but that was easier to refuse (as I weighed the pros of eating chips and drinking beer and watching commercials with the cons of many, many hours of football).

This morning I watched the season finale of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend -- which I've followed, off and on, since its premiere, but I came back into the fold when it introduced Nathaniel, aka My Favorite Trope of villains undone by lust for the hero/heroine.

It was a great finale, in part because the show has been so explicit for so long about blowing up Dumb Romance Narratives. (In contrast, consider the disappointment that everyone feels about The Mindy Project, which zig-zags between embracing and semi-repudiating its tropes. Although, side note: even with its perverse plot-arcs, The Mindy Project could still be satisfying if only it followed the sitcom pattern of stable, developed background characters. I always find it weird that The Mindy Project doesn't do this, given Mindy Kaling's background in The Office. Tight ensembles are the engines that drive Brooklyn-99 and Superstore, and they could potentially salvage The Mindy Project, but...no.)

I fiddled with my Internet settings so that I have severely restricted access to time-wasting sites, so a) we'll see if it aids my productivity! and b) my TV-watching habits are about to dip tremendously.

At work yesterday, my boss told me -- with disgust -- that she had just watched The Lobster. "Have you seen it? What did you think of it?"

"Well, I knew most of the premise going in, but nobody told me about the dog-murder half-way through the movie? I wasn't prepared for the dog-murder."

"Yeah!" she said. "And that last scene! I was watching the movie with an opthamologist, and he was not pleased!"

"Yeah," I said. "It's not a good movie if you object to dog-murder or eye-trauma."

The other two people in the room, who had never even heard of the movie, regarded us with growing horror.

Yesterday I did 6 pomodoros (I wrote ~600 words, I requested library books, and I researched the secondary lit on AO and discovered that it appears not to exist).

I also beat a second playthrough of Banner Saga so, you know, two steps forward, one step back.

Current Tally: $11

(I also set up a Scrivener file for Long Green Grass. I think if I cut out idiot internet distractions, I could easily write 1000 words/day and complete a first draft by the end of March.)

Today I'm going to go into campus (and distribute W-2s like a benevolent W-2 fairy), do a first pass on sourcing the C section. Then I'll come home and have some lunch. Then I'll go back onto campus and do a second pass. By tonight, I want something that stands reasonably complete for this iteration of the work.